Dead Lines

by Greg Bear

  Peter stood in the closet for a few minutes, not moving, staring at the stacked boxes, surprised by his strength. “You’ll die when you don’t want to,” he murmured. “Not a minute sooner.”

  Someone who used Michelle’s room had collected crime-scene photos of his dead daughter. Photos of other murdered people. That was perverse, but it was not beyond belief. Peter had learned about a lot of weird, secret hobbies in his time in Los Angeles. But he could not make the connection. The Joseph he knew—the Michelle he thought he knew—would never do or allow such a thing.

  He looked down one last time at the spilled photos. It was indeed his daughter, but without the painted raccoon markings. Not as she had been when the hikers had notified the police. Not on the dry golden grass of a hillside, covered with clods of dirt and leaves.

  But as her killer would have seen her.

  In the bathroom, the timer clicked off with a short whir.

  Peter left the bedroom and stood in the hallway. With real deliberation—it was almost impossible to force one foot in front of the other—he turned right and walked slowly down the corridor to the door that led to Joseph’s sitting room, the room with a view over the drive and the estate. Motion sensors again switched on the overhead lights as he walked. The stark white glare from each halogen bulb in its recessed can bounced along the dead walls to the end and rushed back in a tidal echo.

  He reached the door and touched the knob. Joseph was inside this room. What condition he was in, Peter could not know; but he could smell the man with senses as sharp as a dog’s, instincts tuned by fear.

  Things were different between them now.

  Peter could almost see it.

  Joseph is sitting in his chair, by the window, waiting for me to come in, a blanket over his legs and a gun, a pistol, resting casually on his lap. He will say, “I’ve killed Michelle. She’s down in the tunnel, and now I’m going to kill you, you bastard, for trying to steal my wife. I hate thieves.” Joseph will raise the pistol and shoot until the clip is empty. There are plenty of places around here to stash bodies.

  Masks and bodies.

  Just what Scragg was looking for.

  Peter clutched the knob and twisted it. He was not now and never had been a coward. The door opened with the familiar slight squeak. The room beyond the door was mostly dark. Light from the hall illuminated the wet bar. Peter pushed the door beyond its second squeak and entered.

  “Don’t turn on the light.”

  For a moment, Peter wondered who was speaking, and then realized it had to be Joseph; it was Joseph. But the voice was weak and under strain.

  “Shut the door. Watch . . . your . . . back.”

  Peter closed the door behind him. Joseph sat in his favorite chair by the moonlit French windows. He was wearing a thigh-length terry-cloth robe and pajamas, both white. The shadow of the window frame covered his face; the moon was high and steady and left a blackness under his chair.

  “Joseph, you bastard, what in God’s name have you done?” Peter said. “Where’s Michelle?”

  Joseph’s hands lay over the ends of the chair arms. They did not move.

  “What . . . Have you been asleep?” Peter demanded.

  “I’ll never sleep again,” Joseph said. “I don’t feel well, Peter.”

  Peter had a difficult time making out his words. “Where’s Michelle?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. Listen.”

  “Should I call a doctor?”

  “Just be quiet and listen.”

  Peter took a step forward, fists clenched. “You have some real explaining to do. I found—”

  “Don’t,” Joseph said.

  Peter stopped. Something in the voice . . . He could not see the gun, but it might still be there, hidden in the folds of the robe. Joseph, as always, was in control. “How long have you been sitting here?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t leave just yet. This is for you, Peter. Listen close. It’s the only explanation I have. Just after I met Michelle, a woman I knew came back with her punk boyfriend to beat money out of me. I shot both of them right where you’re standing.”

  “My God,” Peter said.

  “They’re down in the tunnel. Michelle helped me bury them under the tracks. She helped me pour concrete over the hole. I thought, Good woman. Faithful. Does what I ask. But I guess it broke her spirit. God help me, I triggered something.”

  Peter leaned on the door, still sick with anger, confused, but strangely no longer afraid. He glanced up; lances and motes of silver danced just below the ceiling.

  “I wasn’t sure until a few days ago. I might have guessed . . . But I didn’t want to know.” Joseph’s voice went reed-thin, below a whisper. “She became an empty vessel. Things had been waiting around here a long time for someone like her. They got in, and they do have their fun.”

  Peter’s throat ached. He reached up to touch it; he could feel his vocal cords vibrating. It wasn’t Joseph speaking.

  It was Peter.

  “I wonder who it was that I loved. Maybe there’s a small part of her left,” the voice—Joseph’s voice in his mouth—continued. “How else could she be so convincing and sweet? She must have put most of them down in the tunnel. A few days ago, they started to come back. I’m sorry, Peter. Hell of a note. I’ve warned you. Watch out for Michelle. Take care of her.”

  Peter stood in the growing spell of quiet. His throat relaxed. He tried to breathe. He had not seen Joseph move since entering the room.

  The twinkles on the ceiling flared and vanished.

  Darkness swirled over his head with a noise like windblown curtains, hush.

  The cry that went out of him was shameful, quavering. He wet his pants, anyone would have. But he did not open the door and run. Instead, he reached back and flipped the wall switch.

  To scare off the shadows. How useless, but the last duty owed to a friend.

  Light syruped around the room in resentful waves. The advancing front of luminance crawled up and around Joseph’s legs, his pajamas, his torso, and finally his head, juddering there briefly, as if pressing against some gluey obstacle.

  Joseph sat revealed. His head hung forward. A white face-cloth had been rolled and propped under his chin. Blood from his lips stained the cloth. Two neat holes pierced the hairy chest between the lapels of the robe. In the skin of his forehead, someone had scratched three words in light, bloodless strokes,

  LOVE YOU HONEY

  Peter looked down. Whoever had scratched the message had crouched before Joseph, leaving bloody knee prints.

  A straight pin glinted beside the slippered left foot.

  Peter extended his hand to touch Joseph’s wrist. His palm met a blunt bristling. Five more pins poked up from the skin on the back of Joseph’s hand.

  This was so far beyond Peter’s experience that the chemistry flooding his body actually steadied him. His fingers stopped trembling. A fatal curiosity took over; curious cat. Still alive, temporarily beyond fear; all the fear draining down his pants leg, dripping on the floor. All right, no dignity, what the hell, check his pulse, man.

  Peter pushed back the sleeve of the robe and reached under the wrist with two fingers. No pulse and cold to the touch. He brushed the bluish skin of Joseph’s lower arm. Also cold. His friend and former employer had been dead for a long time. Not seconds, not minutes.

  Hours.

  Peter pulled the toe of his shoe away from the perimeter of gelid blood. Could he believe the confession of a dead man?

  A shining lobe of blue plastic poked from the breast pocket of Joseph’s robe. Peter gingerly reached into the pocket and pulled out a cell phone—not a Trans. He lifted it as he might some large beetle, expecting its carapace to crack open and wings to suddenly whir.

  The phone beeped out a tune in his fingers, “Hernando’s Hideaway.” He jerked but did not drop it. He could easily guess who was on the other end, on the far deadly side of the universe from the rest of the human race.

  He pushed th
e button.

  “Is that you, Peter?” Michelle asked. Her voice was not very clear; she was calling from another phone. She might be in the house.

  “Who else?” Peter asked. He sounded hoarse.

  “Did you find Joseph?”

  “I found him.”

  “He’s dead?”

  Peter did not know how to answer that.

  “Oh, my God, Peter, he’s dead, isn’t he? This is so weird. I don’t know what to say.”

  He stared down at the cold corpse of Joseph Adrian Benoliel. “Who are you?” he asked.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Michelle would not do this.”

  The voice on the other end changed. “Wouldn’t she?”

  “No, she wouldn’t.”

  “Would you like to speak to Michelle? Want me to rummage around and find her?”

  “Who are you?”

  “Michelle is so tiny, down inside here, like a little baby, so I helped her. Can you ever forgive me?”

  Peter faced the door now, eyes wide. In the house. Nearby. “I have to call the police.”

  “What good would they be? She’s been dead and punished for a long time.”

  “Why did you kill Joseph? Did he make you angry?” Peter asked.

  “If I could feel anger, I’d be like you,” Michelle said.

  “Did you kill my daughter?” The old, sane Peter, hiding away from all the horror, could not believe he had just asked that question of Michelle. Her answer was even harder to accept.

  “I ride the horse, and sometimes the horse wants to run.”

  Peter looked around the room, hoping Michelle had left the gun in plain sight; he could use it if he found her. If she came into the room. If he hunted her down on the estate, or anywhere else. “I don’t get you,” he said.

  “My mount. My face. My pretty little mask, Peter.”

  “Oh.” He needed desperately to think things through. “Daniella was just a little girl.”

  “My horse saw how much you loved that little girl. She cried thinking about it. My horse’s father wasn’t so loving. To feel those emotions, all tangled, got in my way.”

  “I still don’t understand.”

  “I know we’ll be going to prison, Peter. It will be wonderful in prison. So many horses without riders. So many masks to wear.”

  Fury and a genuine, gut-deep panic made him shake. He could barely hold the phone, barely speak. She could be anywhere. She’s outside the door.

  “Tell me why you killed Daniella.”

  Michelle sounded petulant, then sighed. “There were only two men my horse loved and trusted. One of them was Joseph, and the other was you. All men are fathers and brothers to my horse. And all men have disappointed her.”

  “That’s a load of crap.”

  “It’s true.”

  The room seemed to quake around him. He gripped his forehead with one hand and looked down, dizzy with rage. “When I find you, I’ll kill you.”

  “Well, you can’t, silly. It’s just us, and we don’t care. Maybe you’ll take your revenge, and empty out. And then perhaps I will ride you. And if the police find us, prison will be lovely. So many of us, all in one place, like a family reunion. Poor Michelle. Good-bye, Peter.”

  The call ended. Peter looked in dismay at the cell phone’s screen, small and tidy and green. So easy to talk anymore, wherever you were, whatever you might be.

  CHAPTER 40

  HE DESCENDED THE stairs into the living room. His thinking was cold and steady, like a steel pendulum swinging from one extreme fact to another. He faced a number of immediate decisions: first, whether to call the police. If he gave truthful answers to the police, nobody would believe him—unless they, too, had seen what a Trans could do to the local dead lines.

  Clever, that. The lines the dead used, not phone lines, but channels of communication nonetheless. Means of escape, diffusion, passage, whatever happened to the memories and experiences and shapes that lingered after death. Arpad had discovered them, a brilliant act, but had then come to the wrong conclusions. Peter thought back once again on that memorable conversation:

  “Trans reaches below our world, lower than networks used by atoms or subatomic particles, to where it is very quiet.”

  Not so quiet after all. Even a little interference made the dead more likely to spark, made their sad flakes of memory linger a little longer, perhaps a lot longer. Until the shapes of the dead filled the Earth, a feast for shadows, scavengers. Attracting worse things than dust mites or worms or eels: lions, hyenas, bears. Sharks. Huge carrion-eaters seldom seen except during the horrors of war, the madness of vast human upheavals, taking advantage of a change in the weather.

  The blinking diode, the grizzly-sized invisibility downstairs. A stalker. Something worse even than the awful opportunist that had entered Michelle, that rode her and called her its mount, that played so well at being human.

  Intelligence without conscience. Curiosity without check or balance. Playing with them all.

  With Daniella.

  The Trans units do not work at Salammbo, inside the houses.

  The lines here are already jammed.

  By what?

  Sweet Jesus, I can’t know any of this, Peter tried to assure himself, but the promise of sanctuary in ignorance rang hollow. He had pieced it together, with Joseph’s help—dead Joseph.

  Joseph. Daniella. The tug, the compulsion. They cannot speak for themselves; nothing moves the air. They are scraps and little more, attracted to your memories. That is how ghosts suck away your energy, trying to be real. They become real only when you see them and remember.

  It all fit. It had to fit. Trans units transfixing that which, by the dictates of any right order, should move on, dissolve, evaporate. Trivial day-to-day chatter unsettling, and then halting outright, the passage of the dead, and exposing another realm, a system of which living things were supposed to be ignorant.

  He felt the burden fall heavily on him now, and it led inevitably to his next decision: What would he do about it? What could anyone do now?

  Peter had always thought of himself as a small if somewhat talented man, charming to a point and not pushy; not a great spirit or a hero. Ordinary life, sex and friendship and marriage, had after all enticed and then defeated him.

  He slowly breathed in, breathed out.

  Thieves. That’s all they were. Thieves.

  He could deal with thieves, couldn’t he? He hated thieves.

  “Help,” he asked softly.

  AT THE BOTTOM of the stairs, the first-floor hallways were dark. But as he turned, looking first left, then right, the lights switched on at the far ends simultaneously, then advanced toward the atrium, illuminating walls and paintings, closed doorways, and rich wool carpets, converging on Peter. Invisible things moved along the halls on both sides—things that no longer followed their natural tendency, no longer faded, but instead had been given weight and purpose.

  Peter’s head began to throb. He could hear his teeth grind and feel his throat stiffen; they wanted to use him, all of them at once. He clutched and slapped at his neck with one hand, then turned to run, but the floor between him and the front door suddenly blurred, then rippled like water. Shadows obscured the marble tiles: swerving serpents, formless waves, swiftly advancing and rising. They covered up the walls, the windows, then whirled around and brushed against him with a careless and needy familiarity.

  The ultimate homeless, the saddest panhandlers of all, long dead: Michelle’s victims.

  How many?

  The door to the elevator opened with a buzzing snick. A single naked bulb burned orange within. The tiny cage dropped, vibrated, and adjusted itself once again to be level with the floor, as if something had stepped inside.

  Something invisible and bulky.

  “No,” Peter said. “No way in hell.”

  “Hell,” someone echoed, using his throat.

  “Hell,” said another presence, and “Hell,” agreed yet anoth
er, all in strangling seizures of his vocal cords. He bit down on his tongue to keep it still, until he could taste blood in his mouth. Muffled groans continued.

  They surrounded him, ripples, silhouettes, suggestions, fragments of dead humanity compressed and herded by others, or maybe just one other, not human. Awkwardly, Peter took a reluctant step toward the elevator. His eyes shut involuntarily, he could not stand the small space, and then he was shoved inside.

  The bronze meshwork door closed. The interior was even smaller than he had imagined.

  The air smelled smoky.

  The dim orange bulb flickered. Pulleys and cables jerked. An electric motor whined.

  The cage bounced and descended.

  CHAPTER 41

  PETER LEANED INTO the corner, eyes flickering, trying to keep as much space and distance in front of his face as he could, an illusion of volume, of not being locked inside a coffin. His face was wet with tears and sweat and his heart galloped in slide rhythms.

  He knew that if he died, right now, he would be stuck on the freeway, stuck in traffic. He would never get out, never find the off-ramp and move on to whatever neighborhood had been his destination to begin with.

  Heaven, staid and orderly and calm, like the Cheviot Hills.

  Or out into the night to just fade away.

  Peter Russell was determined not to die, not here and not now. His heart slowed and steadied.

  The orange light above his head hummed and winked. The cage door slid aside with a reverberant scrape.

  He opened his eyes wide and pushed out of the corner with a hasty flinging of arms and scuffle of shoes, as if fanning a cloud of mosquitoes. But he was alone. The crowd in the elevator had gone. The big presence, the invisible grizzly, was not obvious, either; he had no sensation of being accompanied.

  They could move faster than he, or did not need to move to get out of the way. Jerk edits.

  He stood with arms hanging and hands clenched on a linoleum floor in a room lined with steel storage cabinets. In the far corner an antique washer and a dryer were half hidden by a stack of wooden fruit boxes, and beyond them hunkered an immense water heater, mounted sideways on concrete piers like a ship’s steam boiler. Framed pictures of long-dead actors and actresses lay in toppled piles, blocking the cabinets, dozens of smiles frozen in black and white behind broken glass, strongly handsome and winsomely beautiful faces peering up in false promise of friendship and seduction.